id Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one
who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself.
You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect."

"Perhaps," said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, "she was truly
sorry."

"Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever--more!"

"Well, then, may be she's doing it because she hates you--doing it for
her soul's good--sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering."

Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her
husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own
natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a
logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels.
Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived
half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her
subject to gusts of passionate frankness; she knew the girl to be
proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility
and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs.
Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself
for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs.
Brinkley's theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely
selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been
mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have
had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who
disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than
adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced
she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was
practising her mother's arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense
of Mrs. Pasmer's artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the
allegiance which we pay--and women especially like to pay--to the
tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of
all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the
part of other women--such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.

Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the god spoke no more from behind
the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake;
hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by
that girl's sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she
had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer--an effect so admirably
diso